Fog of confusion brings heartbreak to 60-hour race

Tuesday, April 4, 2017, 5:29 PM - Canadian runner Gary Robbins, who endured a days-long ultramarathon, saw his titanic effort end in heartbreak Sunday.

The Barkley Marathons are a 100-mile (160 km) race in Tennessee that requires those who brave it to collect book pages in a certain order, and finish the entire thing within 60 hours. Since its start in 1986, only fifteen people have successfully completed it.

After intense fog and heavy rain descended on the course, Robbins took the wrong route and arrived at the final checkpoint just six seconds over the race's 60-hour cutoff time, though organizers say his detour would have disqualified him in any case.

"If not for the severe rain and fog, Robbins would have found his way back on course and certainly would have become just the 16th finisher of The Barkley Marathons," Michael Doyle, the editor in chief of Canadian Running magazine, told The Weather Network in an email.

Doyle said the trouble started early for all the runners, with very dense fog rolling in overnight for the event's 1:42 a.m. start.

"One runner I spoke to said he came to what he knew was a cliff, and looked down with his headlamp and only saw a reflection of himself in the all-encompassing fog," Doyle told The Weather Network Tuesday. "This made finding the first few checkpoints extremely time consuming and mentally taxing." 

The sun returned for the race's midpoint, but that only brought a new problem: Temperatures in the high 20s, making hydration a challenge.

And for the final lap, heavy overnight rains made a ruin of the course, making footing difficult, especially when the fog returned. At one point, Doyle says, Robbins was forced to swim across an overflowing river, whose current carried him 10 metres downstream.

"Gary Robbins' one crucial navigational mistake was because of the lack of visibility," Doyle said. "He'd already collected all the pages from the books at the checkpoints to prove that he'd completed the lap. All he had to do was navigate down the last mountain near the finish."

Race organizer Gary "Laz" Cantrell later clarified that Robbins' off-course detour meant he had arrived at the checkpoint two miles shy of the course's length. That, not the six seconds, was what disqualified him.

"Now, the class with which Gary handled this terrible disappointment at the end of a truly magnificent performance … that was exceptional, and is, in and of itself, a remarkable achievement," Cantrell said in a statement to media. "But he did not miss the time limit by six seconds. He failed to complete the Barkley by two miles."

SOURCE: Canadian Running